December 2019 Summaries

Richard Gall, co-editor of Packt Hub, highlights Honeycomb as one of the top ten tech startups to watch in 2020, emphasizing its unique focus on the concept of ownership. In his article, Gall provides a concise overview of Honeycomb and underscores its message by quoting Charity Majors, who articulates that ownership empowers individuals to address necessary improvements and excel in their roles.

In a lively webcast interview, CJ Silverio and Ben Gardella from Eaze discuss the challenges of scaling their service following the legalization of recreational marijuana sales in California, which led to a sudden surge in demand similar to the appeal of pizza delivery. This unexpected success, humorously described as a "catastrophic success," required Eaze to adapt quickly to maintain service reliability amidst increased customer expectations. The conversation covers the initial struggles with infrastructure, including outages during critical periods, and emphasizes the importance of honest communication with partners and customers. They also highlight the role of Honeycomb in facilitating a seamless replatforming process while continuing to operate their existing services. The webcast provides insights into the innovative solutions and strategic decisions that helped Eaze navigate this period of rapid growth.

Two years after introducing Secondary Storage as a cost-effective but slower alternative to primary NVMe storage, Honeycomb has dramatically improved query performance by incorporating AWS Lambda and optimizing data processing. Initially, Secondary Storage used gzip compression for data transferred to S3, leading to significant delays, as queries required extensive CPU resources that were not matched by an equivalent increase in compute power. By leveraging Lambda, which provides on-demand CPUs in 100ms increments, Honeycomb is now able to process large queries concurrently, significantly speeding up performance without the prohibitive cost of permanent resources. Additionally, switching from gzip to LZ4 compression and adopting more efficient memory management techniques have further reduced query times and CPU overhead, making secondary storage queries nearly as fast as those using primary storage. These advancements, which include optimizing code and reducing unnecessary memory allocations, have effectively doubled backend query performance, allowing Honeycomb to offer faster and more efficient data querying solutions.